October 13, 2016 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Bethe Bible
Hans Bethe finally settled in Cornell thanks to the generous
salary of $3000 as a tenured post of assistant professor with the promise of quick
promotion to full time professor.
Cornell physics department now had Hans Bethe and Stanley
Livingston.
It needed another experimental physicist.
Both Bethe and Livingston recommended the name of Robert Bacher, a
struggling physicist at the time of Great Depression when jobs were hard to
come by and salaries low.
Bacher accepted the Cornell offer.
The first thing the trio of Bethe, Livingston and Bacher did was
to write and publish a series of 3 papers that was a comprehensive review of
all that was known in nuclear physics then.
They were published in the peer reviewed scientific journal
“Reviews of Modern Physics” in 1936.
These 3 papers later on came to known as the “Bethe Bible” as they
became the standard reference work on this subject for several years.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign once again tried to
approach Han Bethe with a lucrative salary.
Cornell countered it by doubling Bethe’s salary to $6000.
This is the ultimate proof of your demand in the market.
Hans on getting this offer wrote to his mother still in Germany:
“I am about the leading theoretician in America. This does not
mean the best.
Wigner (Eugene from Hungary) is certainly better and Oppenheimer
and Teller (Edward from Hungary) probably just as good.
But I do more and talk more and that counts too.”
Then in 1938 something interesting happened in Hans Bethe’s life.
No, it was not a girl mon ami.
He happened to get an invite to the Washington’s Conference of
Theoretical Physics in 1938 organized by Carnegie Institute and George
Washington’s University.
The invitees were numbered just 34, the elite Who’s Who of
mathematical physics including Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Geroge Gamow, John
von Neumann among the few.
Bethe was not very keen on the conference initially as the topic
“stellar energy generation” was not to his interest.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or
login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and teacher that I am aware of is Professor
Subhashish in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, he actually does and teaches real
mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All
his books can be downloaded for free through this link.
For
entertainment may I suggest Kids Songs channel.
The 3 papers on nuclear physics that was published by Hans Bethe, Stanley Livingston and Robert Bacher between 1936 and 1937 at Cornell University. The journal was "Reviews of Modern Physics"
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